| Jennifer Baumgardner | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1970 Fargo, North Dakota, United States |
| Occupation | author, journalist, film producer, cultural critic, activist, and public speaker |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | late 20th/early 21st century |
| Genres | books, magazine articles, documentary films |
| Subjects | feminism, third wave feminism, bisexuality, single parenthood, sex, rape, abortion |
| Literary movement | third wave feminism |
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www.soapboxinc.com/jennifer-baumgardner/ |
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Jennifer Baumgardner (born 1970) is an author, filmmaker, and third-wave feminist activist.
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Baumgardner grew up in Fargo, North Dakota and attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, graduating in 1992. While at Lawrence University she helped organize “Guerilla Theater,” a feminist group on campus, and started an alternative newspaper called The Other that focused on issues of women’s liberation. She moved to New York City after graduation and in 1993 began working as an unpaid intern for Ms. Magazine. By 1997 she had become the youngest editor in Ms. Magazine history.
While working at Ms. Magazine Baumgardner fell in love with a fellow woman intern by the name of Anastasia. They broke up in 1996, but the relationship inspired her to publish her first novel Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. In 1997 she began dating Amy Richards, the couple broke up in 2002 but remained friends and have since co-authored two bestselling books together: ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism.
She currently lives in New York with her husband Michael and two sons Skuli and Magnus.
In 1998 Jennifer Baumgardner left Ms. Magazine and began writing independently for a variety of magazines and news organizations. She has since written for numerous magazines, including Glamour, The Nation, Babble, and Maxim. Her books include Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future, Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism written with Amy Richards, and Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. She produced the documentary film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion, which tells the story of ten women's abortion experiences from the 1920s to the present. She has written about purity balls (rituals celebrating virginity),[1] about Catholic hospitals taking over secular ones and eliminating their reproductive services,[2] and about breastfeeding her friend's son.[3]
Baumgardner's work has been featured on shows from The Oprah Winfrey Show to NPR's Talk of the Nation, as well as in the New York Times, BBC News Hour, Bitch, and various other venues. She has keynoted at more than 250 universities, organizations, and conferences, including the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, Amherst College, Take Back The Night UW-Madison, and the New Jersey Women and Gender Studies Consortium. In 2003, the Commonwealth Club of California hailed her in their centennial year as one of six “Visionaries for the 21st Century,” commenting that “in her role as author and activist, [Jennifer has] permanently changed the way people think about feminism...and will shape the next 100 years of politics and culture.”[4]
On October 4, 2000 Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards published their first co-authored book ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. Speaking directly to young third wave feminists, Baumgardner and Richards wrote the book to inspire women of the current generation to consciously embrace the liberation of today while remembering the work of previous feminist generations, writing:
“Consciousness among women is what caused this [change], and consciousness, one's ability to open their (sic) mind to the fact that male domination does affect the women of our generation, is what we need... The presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely notice we have it—it's simply in the water.”[5]
Throughout the book the authors traces feminism's evolution from the First Wave suffragette movement to the Third Wave feminism of today, all the while encouraging readers to continue the feminist fight of previous generations.
After the critical success of ManifestA Baumgardner co-authored yet another book with Amy Richards entitled Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism which was published on December 23, 2004. The purpose of the book was to provide a “handbook” for social activism and to help readers answer the social justice question: What can I do? Based on the authors' own experiences, and the stories of both the large number of activists they work with as well as the countless everyday people they have encountered over the years, Grassroots encourages people to move beyond the "generic three" (check writing, contacting congressional representatives, and volunteering) and make a difference with clear guidelines and models for activism. The authors draw heavily on individual stories as examples, inspiring readers to recognize the tools right in front of them--be it the office copier or the family living room--in order to make change. Activism is accessible to all, and Grassroots shows how anyone, no matter how much or little time they have to offer, can create a world that more clearly reflects their values.[6]
On February 20, 2007 Baumgardner published Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, the first book she had written without the co-authorship of Amy Richards. In Look Both Ways, Baumgardner takes a close look at the growing visibility of gay and bisexual characters, performers, and issues on the national cultural stage. Despite the prevalence of bisexuality among Generation X and Y women, she finds that it continues to be marginalized by both gay and straight cultures, and dismissed either as a phase or a cop-out. Woven in between her cultural commentary, Baumgardner discusses her own experience as a bisexual, and the struggle she’s undergone to reconcile the privilege she’s garnered as a woman who is perceived as straight and the empowerment and satisfaction she’s derived from her relationships with women. [7]
SoapBox Inc. Speakers Who Speak Out is a nonprofit feminist organization started by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards in 2002. Baumgardner and Richard formed the organization with the purpose of providing a national platform for spreading their activist message. Since its creation in 2002 SoapBox Inc. has come to represent dozens of authors, scholars, speakers, and artists at the forefront of feminist politics, and has developed a client base of more than 500 schools and organizations, including Planned Parenthood, St. Thomas University, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, University of Pennsylvania, and Shoreline Community College.
In 2007, they devised an innovative of way of "bringing the campus to the speakers" with the creation of Soapbox Feminist Boot Camps. These week-long intensives immerse participants (of all ages and genders) in the practice of feminism and exposes the myriad issues, approaches, organizations, and individuals that are the lifeblood of the movement [8] Currently these boot campus are the largest feminist immersion programs in the country.
In 2004, Baumgardner created the "I Had an Abortion" project to encourage women (and men) to "come out" about their procedures. The campaign included t-shirts that said "I had an abortion," a film documenting women's stories of abortion, a book, and a photo exhibit.[9] The film features ten different women—one of which being famous feminist Gloria Steinem—openly speaking about their abortion experiences spanning over seven decades from the years prior to Roe vs. Wade to present day.
On the "I Had an Abortion" film website Jennifer writes about her involvement with the campaign, saying:
The I Had an Abortion project had many inspirations. Some were conversations I kept having with second wave feminists on this listserv called History-In-Action, where the women would talk about how infuriating it was that their experiences of abortion—often trauma-free and liberating—were not part of the media presentation or common understanding of the issue. Some were conversations with my frequent writing partner, Amy Richards, who is brave and open about her experiences with abortion. The final inspiration was frustration with how activists (myself included) yell loudly about abortion rights, but rarely place ourselves in the issue. What experiences have pro-choice and pro-life leaders and senators and congresspeople personally had with abortion?
Frustration with the yelling and the lack of personal stakes in reporting on this issue led me to want to approach it only personally—get right to the women and their stories, their faces and their lives, and get away from their political opinions. Thus, this is a pro-abortion rights project that is most concerned with creating space for women and men to speak honestly about their lives and their abortion experiences. [10]
After the success of the “I Had an Abortion” campaign Jennifer began spearheading the “I Was Raped” project in 2008. Modeled after the 2004 abortion campaign, the project encouraged men and women to “come out” about their experiences with sexual assault, and included the production and distribution of “I was raped” t-shirts and a film documenting the stories of individuals who had experienced sexual assault in their lifetimes.
In a 2008 interview with Scarleteen Baumgardner spoke about the campaign, remarking “The ‘I Was Rape’ Project is a documentary, t-shirt campaign, and resources designed to a) highlight the prevalence of rape in our culture and b) interrupt the silence and shame that surrounds it. The goal of this project is to add nuance to the cultural conversation around rape. The reality of rape is more subtle than the preconceptions suggest. The act of rape—as well as the emotions and reactions of the raped—fall somewhere outside of the black-and-white roles of perpetrator and victim. The current things we have in place for justice are also inadequate, since the vast majority of rape victims don’t want to or choose to press charges. The aim of this documentary is to highlight these issues, as well as to give rape survivors a voice.”
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